As part of the last playthrough of Zelda: A Link to the Past, I was reflecting on what the progression system looked like and how the hero of the story, Link, who is getting stronger and stronger, better and better and more to take on far more challenges across the story arc in the end than he did in the beginning.
If we remember that in the beginning, we did not even have a sword or a shield, when we woke up and heard this mysterious voice in our home. Our uncle set off to help that voice. We left the house. We ran through the rain. We made our way to the castle. We found the hidden passage into the castle. And only then, we had our first weapon – our uncle’s shield and sword in our hands to defend ourself.
The progression system in Zelda: A Link to the Past is really based on four pillars. These four pillars are:
- the weapons and the shields that you are getting and upgrading.
- the hearts and heart containers that you find, to sustain more damage
- items in the game to attack very specific enemies and, last but not least the
- players’ craftiness to use the items to their advantage and thus make Link more powerful.
If we look closely, we could make a claim that sword, shield and the other items fit the same category, but that’s not necessarily true in all cases, specifically since shield and sword not only defend link and are used to fight almost exclusively. Other items, especially dungeon items, can be used to open new ways and unlock areas in the game world, inside and outside of dungeons alike. So most of the items that we find and get in dungeons are not only weapons, but also change things in the castle. You can fight the end boss, but you can also use them in the real world and change the environment. Lift blocks, create blocks, use the hook to overcome gaps, hammer down barriers, swim across waters.
For shield and sword as the game progresses, Link can pick up more powerful gear. There’s four swords including uncle’s sword and the Master Sword, that Link will pick and can upgrade to. For more upgrades, Link can optionally visit the Smithy brothers to have them make a more powerful sword after a side quest, and later ask the pyramid fairy in the Dark World, to get the most powerful sword in the game. Aside from the first shield, there’s another two that Link can optionally buy or find in one of the final dungeons.. Most prominently clearly the Master Sword that Link must pick up, as part of the main story, after he picked up the three medallions in the Light World to then be able to open the seal in the castle and then go defeat Ganon.
In order for Link to sustain more damage from enemies, heart containers are the most obvious buff. Link finds heart containers in every dungeon but also in different places in the world. Some are fairly obviously hidden in plain sight, others are harder to get to and tied to a puzzle or gated through an item that is available only later int he game. Not all of the heart containers can be accessed right away, making the collection an all-game side quest.
The items that Link can then use to fight and change the environment in his favour. For example, the hook, the Pegasus boots, the hammer, the glove. They are certainly the most iconic, well-known way in the Zelda franchise to, at least in the early Zelda games, to gate progression. Most of these items are tied to visiting a dungeon. The gating is made such that you have to solve large parts of the dungeon already before you can get the boss key, and then use the boss key to unlock the item and after, fight the end boss. Most of the time, the end boss is also susceptible to damage through the newly acquired item. Often, you use the new item to fight the boss in the first stage of the fight, while you change to a different weapon in the second stage of the fight. Having overcome the dungeon, the item often is then used in the world again to unlock a new area or a new path to the next dungeon. Early on in the game, you get the Pegasus boots from Sahasrahla, after you completed the East Palace – which gives you access to the book in the library, for your progression to the desert palace. In the desert palace, you are getting the power glove, that lets you lift heavy rocks, that in turn gate the path to the last dungeon.
The Zelda franchise does it really cleverly in a way that you can only access a new area if you have completed the previous area or the previous dungeon. So from a story progression, the world items and the items that you pick up, are certainly the ones that gate you the most. Not from a hero is getting stronger perspective but from a story and from a unlocking the additional areas and finding more things and uncovering more secret areas and secret items perspective. If you want the game in full, you have to find all of the items and then explore the map.
The last part is certainly the most interesting, but sometimes overlooked: it’s you, the player –who goes through an interesting progression as well. We’ve seen this in the tutorial area, the starting sequence in the castle where at the very beginning, we need to find Princess Zelda and rescue her and bring her to the sanctuary. The game is teaching you the core mechanics of the game and is helping you understand what’s expected from you – the player controlling Link. It doesn’t teach you these things by showing you a text box or giving you a wall of text that you need to read. It shows you in the environment, and let’s you explore the mechanics, small puzzles and the possible solutions for yourself. One of the examples is that there is a section in the castle where you need to follow a narrow path with an abyss left and right from you. The game teaches you here, in a clearly different looking and differently designed screen, that you can fall down and take damage. But it’s also crafted such that enemies are placed cleverly – and so you learn, by fighting them, that you can push them off the edge with a sword stroke. This isn’t an accident, but built this way, to teach you without words. Another example for how the game teaches you, is when you progress down the castle to find Zelda, you will find the boomerang. You can use the boomerang to stun the more powerful knight that is guarding Zelda and that in turn when you defeat him gives you the key to free Zelda. This is the first enemy where you can try and use the boomerang and really stun him and understand the mechanic behind the boomerang. As that knight is the first enemy with a long range weapon, you can’t use your sword comfortably, but need to act carefully: by throwing the boomerang that has a slightly longer range, you stun the knight, come closer and beat him with your sword. One is the stunning part, and one is the part that even though you have the boomerang, there is a number of times that you have to use the boomerang in order to defeat the enemy. Whereas if you use the boomerang and the sword, you combine two fantastic weapons and you can overcome the enemy quicker. because the sword is the more powerful weapon in terms of dealing damage as opposed to the boomerang that only stuns and deals a little bit of damage.
The game is very good at teaching you specific moves, specific riddles and puzzles that you will encounter with Link later on. It gives you ideas about what is expected from you later – and introduce you to patterns and puzzle that the game is made of. Many times, the puzzles introduced early on, are recalled later, in a slightly more complex form. Remebering and applying past knowledge in slightly different forms again to newer puzzles, and transfer previously acquired knowledge to similar challenges is how you – the player – grow in the game, and how you go through a progression. It’s the waterfalls that you can go through, the enemies that you shoot in a specific way to unlock a path, the candles you light, to uncover a secret chest. You’ve learned this mechanics and puzzles earlier, and get to re-apply that knowledge later, in a different form. This also encourages trying and exploring, testing and failing – and strengthens the player’s self-esteem when they figure out a solution to a puzzle.
A Link to the Past is fantastic in its capabilities of visual storytelling and introducing the player into ways of handling and managing and beating the game without explicitly telling the player of how to do it. Spending more time with the game, players are getting more and more advanced in leveraging extra knowledge they acquire from the game world, and re-apply it in the game world. And the game does it very cleverly too. It’s not dumping all of the information and all of the extra knowledge onto the player in a small amount of time, but places information and mechanics to learn across the game world. Not all of the mechanics and not all of the crafty ways of dealing with riddles and puzzles need to be broken to the player in the first two or three hours, but are distributed across the play experience until the very end. There’s all kinds of switches and all kinds of ways to manipulate the game world that are taught to the player across the stretch of the play that the player can recall later on, once they learned them and once they applied them successfully once.
